![]() Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe. In 2016, Johnson was featured in the film Hidden Figures starring Taraji P. On November 24, 2015, President Barack Obama awarded Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Retiring from NASA in 1986, Johnson’s trailblazing career spanned thirty-three years of achievements, including: the Apollo Group Achievement Award and the NASA Lunar Orbiter Spacecraft and Operations Team Award, given in 1967, an honorary Doctor of Laws from SUNY (State University of New York) Farmingdale in 1998, the West Virginia State College “Outstanding Alumnus of the Year,” in 1999, and an honorary Doctor of Science, awarded by Capitol College of Laurel, Maryland, in 2006. Seven years later, she crafted America’s navigational track for the flight landing the first humans, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on the moon’s surface. When NASA began using computers, she was asked to verify related calculations for the first American to actually orbit the earth, John Glenn, in 1962. Between 19, as the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union intensified, Johnson calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, on May 5, 1961. In 1959, when Virginia public schools began desegregating, Johnson was calculating space-flight trajectories in Hampton, Virginia for Project Mercury, America’s first manned space-flight program. Claytor designed a special course in analytic geometry for her. William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor, the third African American to earn a Ph.D. She skipped grades to start high school at ten, graduating at fourteen. Her father returned home to work the farm while her mother, a former teacher, became a domestic worker and stayed with the children in Institute.Ĭoleman’s love for mathematics helped her excel in school. He moved his family 125 miles from their White Sulfur Springs home to Institute, West Virginia so that Katherine and her older siblings, Charles, Margaret, and Horace, could attend school beyond the eighth grade. Johnson’s mathematical prowess led her to assist NACA’s all-male team of engineers tasked with finding solutions to America’s space-flight navigation problems.īorn to Joshua and Joylette Coleman, Katherine’s father was a farmer and janitor who quit school after the sixth grade. Twenty years later, married with three children, she transitioned from a teaching career to a coveted research mathematician position, at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, 1915-1958), the predecessor to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA, 1958- ). In 1937, she graduated summa cum laude (with highest distinction), with a Bachelor of Science in French and Mathematics, from West Virginia State University (formerly West Virginia State College). In the second video, Johnson reflects on some of her experiences working at NASA, raising 3 children, and being an African-American woman mathematician in the 1950’s.Katherine Goble Johnson, heralded as the first African American woman in Aerospace Engineering, was born on August 26, 1918, in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia, a city where schooling for “colored” people ended with the eighth grade. In the first video, Johnson is presented this prestigious award. The following videos were presented at the National Space Grant meeting in Washington, D.C. ![]() Known for accuracy in computerized celestial navigation, her technical work at NASA spanned decades during which she participated in calculating the trajectories, launch windows, and emergency back-up return paths for many flights from Project Mercury including the early NASA missions of John Glenn and Alan Shepard, the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon, through the Space Shuttle program and even early plans for the Mission to Mars. Johnson made contributions to the United States’ aeronautics and space programs with the early application of digital electronic computers at NASA. This year’s recipient is physicist and mathematician Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson. ![]() Bentsen for his visionary work in creating the National Space Grant College and Fellowship Act. The inaugural award was presented in 2003 to former Senator and Secretary of the Treasury Lloyd M. The National Space Grant Distinguished Service Award was established to recognize individuals whose life and career have had a long lasting impact in a science, engineering or education field that is related to aeronautic, aviation, or space endeavors. ![]()
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